Apple issues App Store-wide Emoji take-down order

Apple has issued an App Store-wide take-down of all Emoji-enabling iPhone …

Apple has issued a store-wide take-down order to all App Store products that offer Emoji support, Ars has learned. Emoji icons are part of the device's Japanese language support and not meant for general use around the world. Emoji is disabled by default and hidden on all phones outside of Japan.

Emoji, for those who aren't familiar, refers to a set of pictographs, which can be used from the iPhone keyboard to augment text-based messages with cute emoticons. Emoji items, which provide a wide range of symbols, take up a single character each. This makes them especially welcome to SMS texters, who are limited to roughly 140 characters per message.

In January, David Chartier showed Ars readers how to enable Emoji icon support by using an inexpensive iPhone application. Once enabled, readers could access those symbols from the standard iPhone keyboard by clicking the International Globe key. The iPhone offers six palettes of Emoji symbols, each one containing several screens full of icons. Emoji palettes include time, facial expressions, nature, and travel.

iPhone developer Gary Fung, whose Typing Genius Emoji support we posted about earlier this month, informed Ars this morning that Apple has pulled all existing applications that do not provide functionality beyond Emoji enabling. We were told that Emotifun and iEmoji have already been removed from the store. Unlike other apps that provide a core program with Emoji features, these two titles existed solely to enable that hidden iPhone preference that lets any iPhone access Emoji.

Existing applications that offer Emoji enabling beyond their base functionality have been ordered to remove Emoji support. Fung told us that Apple has required an immediate update to his Typing Genius program with the Emoji support removed. This same order appears to have gone out to all developers whose App Store marketing text mentions an Emoji feature.

Be aware that if you have enabled Emoji support already on your device, Apple's move today should not affect you. Once your unit has enabled Emoji access, this preference remains persistent. It should even survive across firmware restores (assuming you have allowed your iPhone to back up) and updates. That's because the preferences file that has been affected is part of the iPhone's normal backup. Once set, the option remains set.

When Ars attempted to create a free Emoji enabler, the utility was rejected during its initial App Store submission. At that time, other applications got through. Today, it appears that Apple is addressing this review inconsistency and implementing a blanket no-Emoji support policy.

The reason that Apple is doing this may be two-fold. First, Emoji enabling falls into a gray area in terms of iPhone development. To make Emoji happen, applications must write to a file that lives outside their individual application sandbox but that is accessible to read-write commands. That's because Apple has set that access to "allow" in its overall Sandbox permissions. This has sent a mixed message to developers, who have chosen to interpret this "allowed" access as they see fit. With its move today, Apple has clarified that policy in no uncertain terms.

The second reason may involve licensing of the images. That Apple has disabled a feature outside a particular country's region indicates that the company may not own the rights to use the Emoji icons on a world-wide basis. Ars has written to Apple for a statement but has not heard back as of publication time.

Ars readers point out that the Emoji icons do not use standard Unicode. Forum poster Fotek writes that "the most likely reason it's been disabled is because the Unicode characters used for Emoji haven't been standardised - even in Japan - and allowing them to be used more widely may create problems implementing something more permanent in the future." Since carriers tend to use non-standard Emoji implementations, a phenomenon called "mojibake" has become more widely pronounced. It's the notion that some messages, particularly Emoji-laden ones, get garbled when received on a phone whose character set implementation differs slightly from the sending phone.

Developers are now responding to Apple's requests and providing the updated applications that have been demanded. At this time, however, there are still a number of Emoji-enabler applications available at App Store, which we have confirmed can still be downloaded as of this morning. These applications are likely to go away over the next several days and weeks.

32 Reader Comments

I tend to be opposed to the use of emoticons in online discussions, so I'm rather surprised at myself to find that I love texting with Emoji icons. I think it's because Emoji increases the likelihood that my correspondence is peppered with pointless graphical non sequiturs. If I could end this comment with a picture of a hamburger, I would.

I (coincidentally) grabbed 'Typing Genius' just before this ban came in and I'm glad I did because I'm quite fond of the Emoji icons.

What I would say in response to this article though is that the most likely reason it's been disabled is because the Unicode characters used for Emoji haven't been standardised - even in Japan - and allowing them to be used more widely may create problems implementing something more permanent in the future.

Apparently ( link), the Emoji characters used in the iPhone only map to other Softbank phones while the other Japanese carriers all have slightly different implementations. There is even a word for the garbled message that can result: 'mojibake'..!

Thanks, Fotek -- that's very interesting. I had seen the word 'mojibake' used before to label the placeholder characters that web browsers display when a glyph can't be found in the current font, such as a typical user in the U.S. might see when attempting to view web pages in Bengali, for example. I never made the connection between 'mojibake' and 'emoji!'

I may be too ignorant of the details of all this for my own good, but why don't they just license a version for use in the U.S.? Or create their own versions for use on the iPhone?

I fail to see what the big bugaboo is about using emoji-style icons in text or emails. If people like using them, why isn't Apple looking for a solution to make customers happy instead of pulling a RIAA-style lock-down?

Now this is interesting.Not many people (even in Japan) realizes this but the Emoji today on iPhone is called SoftBank Emoji and it is the Emoji designed by SoftBank, the operator that sells iPhone here in Japan.In Japan, there has been a rumor about NTT DoCoMo, one of the oldest (and largest) operator might also get a deal with Apple.

They haven't for the past seven months but I think during this time SoftBank has done a great job in the little liberty they had to promote the iPhone in Japan. Which other head of telephone operators in the world went to talk to Apple and ask to add market specific needs such as emoji? And which other telephone operators in the world invented a work around to answer those market specific needs themselves; for those of you who doesn't know, you can watch TV on iPhones here in Japan because watching TV on phone is a feature you will find in more than 80% of the phones sold here in Japan. If Apple made a deal with other operator, I think this hadn't happened. Of course, SoftBank is not dumb. When they persuaded Apple that emoji is a must in Japan, I wonder if they also told Apple, the emoji Apple will be putting in will be SoftBank emoji designed and used only by SoftBank.

Japanese mobile phone operators are so close minded that they don't allow people to SMS to users of other operators. And they don't like people sending emoji e-mail to people who are using phones from other operators. Thus all three major operators have different set of emojis and they are incompatible until recently when some company came with server-side conversion service.

It is such a shame that because no Japanese companies or no Japanese government entity nor Japanese standard organization try to standardize emoji, Google is doing the work for them (if you use Gmail, you can receive and display emoji from all the different operators).

Anyway, I am guessing having emoji on iPhone could have been (at least partially) a strategic move by SoftBank. And Apple may have noticed it.

As June approaches, people again have started to talk that iPhone might be available on NTT DoCoMo. Maybe this move by Apple meant something there.

Anyway, if I could have interest you in how iPhones are doing in Japan, check out my blog, too. Thanks.http://blog.nobi.cc

(It's worth noting, too, that the OMA WAP Forum spec document on Emoji basically says "use Unicode, preferably mapping to existing characters, but use a private range if you need to", but it doesn't specify which ranges should be used, and although there are noises about standard encodings, none actually exist yet).

Here are the steps to get emoji activated using the free Spell Number app:• Download and install Spell Number from the App Store• Launch Spell Number• Enter the number "9876543.21"• Exit the Spell Number app, going back to your Home screen• Launch the Settings app• Go to the General / Keyboard / International Keyboards / Japanese section, and toggle the "Emoji" setting to "On".• Exit the Settings app, then when you enter text mode in any app, hit the Globe icon to go to the emoticon section of the virtual keyboard

The sad thing about Emoji is that they only show up for other iPhone applications. In e-mail or web or twitter when viewed from non-iPhone clients, they just show up as rectangles or not at all. That kind of reduces their utility for use in most daily activities for me, since I've got an iPod Touch and not an iPhone.

Originally posted by nevali:As far as I know, Emoji between Softbank phones only works when the message passes through Softbank's SMS or e-mail gateway—other Softbank devices use S-JIS instead, creating even more headaches.

Essentially, the iPhone OS is the only platform to use this particular encoding.

Now it is up to Docomo to play nice. Each vendor's emoji use different mappings in the Unicode private use area so there has not been much compatibility effort, especially from Docomo. I attended a Japanese font panel discussion on emoji compatibility issues in 2005 and Docomo told KDDI, Microsoft, Adobe and Apple that incompatibility was everybody else's problem.

Shades047 is right.You can't send SMS between different carriers in Japan.In Japan, not only the carriers but the massmedia (me included) suck! Most of them don't blame for it!Actually, Shade047 reminded me of good tip for you if you come to Japan.

I was sending my friend who has a iPhone bought outside Japan.I kept sending her SMS but she said she has never received one SMS since she arrived in Japan.After we finally met using public phones, etc., I found her iPhone was connected to NTT DoCoMo's network.

If you bring your foreign iPhones to Japan because both SoftBank and NTT DoCoMo uses UMTS (W-CDMA ), your iPhone could catch NTT DoCoMo's network and roam on it. If that happens, you won't receive any SMS while in Japan. You have to force your iPhone to catch SoftBank's network.; as soon as she did that she was flooded with my SMS simply saying 'test' each of which could cost her 100 yen (or $1 ).

Also although some people believe Japan has most advanced phones in the world, there had been a hidden cost in your monthly bills. 2 years ago NEWSWEEK JAPAN has run a cover story titled "Japan: a backward nation for cell phone". (it was a few months after I wrote the same for MacPeople publication but NEWSWEEK is perhaps read by ten times more people ;-) ) The article pointed out that Japanese monthly bills are the highest of the world. Japanese government knew this problem. Ask the carriers to display the real price of the cell phone in Japan and the sales of cell phones in Japan was severely damaged. And then came the iPhone 3G to Japan; it was center of focus for all media just as in the US (or maybe even more because it was their first iPhone); I [url=http://oreilly.com/pub/a/mac/2007/03/13/a-chat-with-nobi.html ] have a device that will record all the TV shows in Tokyo for 24 hours for 7 week and search later [/url]. After 7 days iPhone went on to sale, I did a search using that device and I found about 250 TV clips.

Most of the Japanese phones that would 'Wow' you would actually cost $700 or $800 much much more than the iPhones that American people would find 'expensive"; it is not that Japanese people are richer, it is just that they had been fooled by the carriers.

SoftBank, the carrier for iPhone in Japan is the newest and they have their roots in IT industry (not Japanese government bureaucracy), so they kept doing a good work of inventing a new and fair practices in the phone industry (I think).

I will try to post more of these in my blog (because I think it is not ArsTechnica kind of information ;-)

I don't get why Emoji compatibility should be so hard. I realize that no carrier want to change their own standard, but couldn't the problem be solved at the handset level if everyone just agreed to add a single glyph specifying what Emoji encoding they use? ("Solved" as in a temporary solution until it is standarized by Unicode or whatever.)

Originally posted by napik:I don't get why Emoji compatibility should be so hard. I realize that no carrier want to change their own standard, but couldn't the problem be solved at the handset level if everyone just agreed to add a single glyph specifying what Emoji encoding they use? ("Solved" as in a temporary solution until it is standarized by Unicode or whatever.)

Kanjo is right. It is such a shame but although emoji is Japanese culture, Japanese are incapable of making international standards (especially making it collaborative way. All the Japan made standard such as VHS vs beta or HD-DVD vs Bluray ultimately became winner-takes-all game).

Beside that, Japanese handset manufacturers are not allowed to suggest anything (or at least they feel that way); in Japan, every standards are set/decided by the carriers. Most manufacturers sit and wait until the carriers decide on the spec and manufacturers the device accordingly.

Kanjo is right. It is such a shame but although emoji is Japanese culture, Japanese are incapable of making international standards (especially making it collaborative way. All the Japan made standard such as VHS vs beta or HD-DVD vs Bluray ultimately became winner-takes-all game).

Beside that, Japanese handset manufacturers are not allowed to suggest anything (or at least they feel that way); in Japan, every standards are set/decided by the carriers. Most manufacturers sit and wait until the carriers decide on the spec and manufacturers the device accordingly.

"I fail to see what the big bugaboo is about using emoji-style icons in text or emails. If people like using them, why isn't Apple looking for a solution to make customers happy instead of pulling a RIAA-style lock-down?" --Kempai Tai

OMGz! Sum1 is using teh super-secret feature THAT WE BUILT INTO OUR PRODUCT!!1!1 We must stops dem!!!11!!1 We must not not allows teh peoplez to use teh products they payed 4 withotu our permissions!!!!!!!!!111111!!!ONE!!!!!111ELEVEN!!